As much as I want to participate in debates going on here at Filipino Voices, I believe that blogging – whether it’s here or in my own blog – is supposed to be fun. Even if we are talking about issues.
Anyway, at the risk of being called a so-called intellectual with all heart and no brain (whoa, WHOA!), I’m going to pull a stretch for this week’s contribution (Nick: forgive me, I’m a stream-of-thought blogger).
I can’t take a picture to save my life (much less talk about poverty or memoranda of agreement), but for those of you who are wondering what that picture is, it’s the branch of McDonald’s at Tomas Morato… shaped like a giant box of French fries.
Interesting…
George Ritzer, in his book The McDonaldization of Society (1995), outlines four important components of the changes our society undergo to be a fast-food restaurant. The explanations are mine, not necessarily Rizter’s:
- Efficiency. Things must be done fast, and in a set order. No matter how inefficient a system may be (like MRT rides, queues at the supermarket, and so on and so forth), Ritzer claims that it only has to be the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B.
- Calculability. Everything can be measured, quantity = quality, yadda yadda yadda. Stuff is no longer measured in terms of the subjective, but in terms of the objective: the “what can be measured.” There are many examples of this: quotas, productivity, five-minute guarantees at Starbucks, three-minute waiting times at KFC, it’s not about the content but it’s about the comments… I’ll stop there.
- Predictability. There’s no room for surprises in anywhere: everything has to be safe. Take a job at a call center: you’ll end up doing everything in the same way all the time. Or commuting to work: you’ll take up the same route all the time. No room for change: everything’s already preset.
- Control. There’s no room for creativity in the McDonaldized dystopia. Home-cooked goodness, my ass. Everything’s fast, everything can be measured, everything sucks, everything’s the same.
So what does all this have to do with impeaching a President, solving the problem of poverty, the constitutionality of a memorandum of agreement, freedom of speech, the Presidential gaffe, the global financial crunch, Cristy Fermin vs. Nadia Montenegro, or whatever?
Hmmm… you know what they say: no matter how much things change, the more they stay the same. Even our opinions (yes, even blog entries) take the character of McDonald’s meals: efficient, calculable, predictable, controlling. A lot about our lives, careers, and thoughts are McDo: unsatisfying meals that are comfortable, but kind of cause diarrhea. But there’s nowhere else to go; there’s nowhere more convenient, nowhere with “bigger” servings, because Ronald McDonald is the lesser evil, because we content ourselves with it. Maybe because we feed our children with it.
Maybe because we have no choice but to content ourselves with the French fries of our society: that we can’t do anything about the poor, that the President deserves her spot because of the rule of law, that we shouldn’t save the poor, that if a free society cannot help the many who are poor then it cannot save the few who are rich…
Maybe I’ve been eating too many fries… welcome to McDonald’s.
Popularity: 2% [?]
In another lifetime, I worked as a delivery boy, messenger and clerk for the San Francisco Chronicle (while putting myself and wife through college, mind you). Across from where we worked (On Fifth and Mission) was a place called the Gianinni Food Fair which featured Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Italian, Filipino, Greek, Russian and “American” food. I’d like to think that Filipino Voices feels more like Gianini’s than MacDonalds. After all we have fruits and nuts as well as steaks and chops (and everything in between) around here.
As it should be.